1. I’m going to quote something Sharon Holland once said to me about my job: Get Off Prison Time. Whatever it is the administration or your senior colleagues says it wants from you, is not what you should want for yourself.
-
-
Näytä tämä ketju
-
1, continued. Take a look at your tenure timelime and reverse-engineer a publication schedule based on when your dossiers will go out for review. Then adjust it for the kind of institution you would like to work at, if you are not at that kind of institution now.
Näytä tämä ketju -
1, continued. That timeline is your bible. Everything you say yes or no to is ultimately based on that timeline. In surfing terms: spot the horizon and don’t look at your board or your feet. What is *your* horizon.
Näytä tämä ketju -
2. Listen to the social cues of the institution: where do they need you to be visible, what kind of performance are they expecting from you. Are you supposed to be at every faculty meeting? What kind of visibility serves your interests, psychically, spiritually, professionally.
Näytä tämä ketju -
2a. Find a way to discern what is necessary and what is not. Choose based on your timeline, your interests, and your needs with one eye to the tenure cues, but not both eyes.
Näytä tämä ketju -
2b. Find a mentor that will say true things to you. If you have been assigned a mentor, that person must earn your trust. Engage them as a mentee who needs their advice, ask questions you need answers for, but not as a person to confide in, until they demonstrate trustworthiness.
Näytä tämä ketju -
2c. And by trustworthiness, I mean minoritarian trustworthiness. You know what I mean here.
Näytä tämä ketju -
3. Your audience is the world, not your colleagues. I texted this to a beloved junior colleague, woman of color, whom I admire so much this morning, who is under duress and attack at her institution:
Näytä tämä ketju -
3a."Stay strong. Your work is beautiful and your audience is not <institution name removed>. You are bigger and more important than they and their world is tinier and less important than you. Don’t let them convince you that their smallness is a reality."
Näytä tämä ketju -
3b. This is something I particularly want to say to faculty of color at liberal arts colleges and small institutions, especially ones where the culture has encouraged people to invest locally and not look nationally to the practices and conversations of the field and professions:
Näytä tämä ketju -
3c. You are here to write true things into the world that your local culture will not like, and you must put as much energy as possible into building your audience, your family, your coterie in the field. This brings me to
Näytä tämä ketju -
4. Your job is to produce a dossier nobody can argue with. It is your only job, your primary job, your first thought in the morning and your last thought at night, alongside your health and the people you love.
Näytä tämä ketju -
4a. This is particularly true if, like me, you grew up poor. I mean really poor, dirt poor, not enough food poor. (Oh, you ask, why do I write about food? That's why.) You must do what you have to do to ascertain your financial security in the future.
Näytä tämä ketju -
4b. Service, though often fulfilling and politically righteous, is a barrier to you and financial wellbeing. Do the service that feeds your soul, if it does. But put a cap on it until you have tenure. Which brings me to
Näytä tämä ketju -
5. The Shit Sandwich. How to Say No. The shit sandwich is two pieces of flattering doughy white bread that says nice things wrapped around a solid, meaty "no."
Näytä tämä ketju -
5a: by example: Thank you for asking me! I'm so happy you thought of me!!! Right now I'm rushing to meet two deadlines because I really want to be sure to have a strong dossier when I go up for review <this fall/whatever>. But thank youuuuuu!!!! Please think of me again!
Näytä tämä ketju -
6. Regarding your writing: everybody in the world hires editors and copyeditors and developmental editors and they all lie about it. I work with editors for fellowship applications and I worked with an editor for my first book.
Näytä tämä ketju -
6b. Working with that developmental editor created more work for me and slowed down the publication of the book. But what it did was teach me how to write a teachable book. I wanted my book to have an impact, to be beautifully written, and to be taught in graduate and u/g classes
Näytä tämä ketju -
6c. A developmental editor does none of your thinking or research for you. What s/he/they do is point out the places where the knots in your head aren't reaching your reader. Then you have to do all the work of untangling them. Find a good one, if you can afford it.
Näytä tämä ketju -
6c, continued: If not: writing groups are key. KEY.
Näytä tämä ketju -
6d. Anyway the short story around this is: if you can farm out tedious editing and copyediting. Save your time, make your fellowship applications stronger, do conceptual and archival work as much as possible.
Näytä tämä ketju -
7. Right, fellowships. Start applying to them right away. Start applying to small ones. Do it before you have kids (if that's a thing) and while you can travel. Get one week, two week fellowships.
Näytä tämä ketju -
7b. Little fellowships make lines on your cv that impress other committees and turn into big fellowships. Again: get an editor. Another option is
Näytä tämä ketju -
7c. Ask your research dean or equivalent if there are funds for fellowship consultants. There are often such consultants reserved for people in the sciences and ask if you can talk to one.
Näytä tämä ketju -
7d. These people are connected with NEH and ACLS former reviewers who will take a stipend to review your proposal and give you pointed feedback. Get on that train and get paid.
Näytä tämä ketju -
8. Okay this: if you are a working class or first generation or QTPOC person and you are experiencing your first years on the tenure track as an attack on your psychic health and wellbeing: you are not crazy.
Näytä tämä ketju -
-
8b. But they will try to make you crazy. And most of all, they will delight when as a normal human being, you act crazy. So you must, you must, do what you can to master the codes of civility while finding the pockets of the world that keep you sane and intact.
Näytä tämä ketju -
8c. Do not live on campus. White people I'm not talking to you. POCs: get off campus and out of that town. Commute, drive, take the train, whatever. Live where you can be a creative intact person and make the dossier and material that keeps you breathing every day.
Näytä tämä ketju -
9. This is counter-intuitive to the dossier advice, but also to the cultures of some institutions? But I have found that the closer I bring my research to my teaching and vice versa....
Näytä tämä ketju - Näytä vastaukset
Uusi keskustelu -
Lataaminen näyttää kestävän hetken.
Twitter saattaa olla ruuhkautunut tai ongelma on muuten hetkellinen. Yritä uudelleen tai käy Twitterin tilasivulla saadaksesi lisätietoja.